It’s barely bigger than a tennis ball and pale green like young sage. One look tells you exactly what it wants to become: a small, edible bowl. ‘Tonda chiara di Toscana’ is no ordinary courgette. It’s a piece of Florence that fits into any vegetable patch, and its story crosses the Atlantic twice.
A Journey Across the Atlantic — Twice
The story doesn’t begin in Tuscany but in the Americas. Cucurbita pepo, the species all courgettes belong to, is native there. It was cultivated for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. After 1492, American squashes crossed to Europe as part of the great botanical exchange that followed Columbus.
Italy embraced them quickly. By the mid-sixteenth century, Italian cooks were using both young and mature fruits. Over the centuries, growers selected plants for shape, colour, growth habit and culinary purpose. The familiar cylindrical courgette emerged around Milan in the nineteenth century.
Meanwhile, a round type was flourishing in Tuscany. The regional food heritage project Vetrina Toscana places its traditional home in the Valdarno and the countryside around Florence, in the provinces of Arezzo and Firenze. In honesty, the history of the courgette in general is far better documented than that of this particular variety. Nobody knows who first bred it.
What’s in a Name?
The name is really a little description:
- tonda — round
- chiara — light, pale
- di Toscana — from Tuscany
Tuscans know it by many names: Zucchina tonda fiorentina, Zucchino tondo di Firenze, or simply Zucchine da far ripiene, “courgettes for stuffing”. In 1987 the horticultural author Tesi described it as ‘Tonda chiara di Toscana’, also known as ‘Tondo di Firenze’.
The word “zucchino” itself has a curious past. It’s the diminutive of zucca, meaning squash, so literally “little squash”. A Tuscan botanical dictionary of 1809 still used it for small, dried bottle gourds that served as tobacco containers. Only in the 1840s did Tuscan cookbooks apply it to the young, edible fruits. As Italian became standardised, “zucchini” displaced many regional words. By the early twentieth century it had crossed back to America, travelling the opposite way from its ancestors.
A Taste of Tuscany in Your Garden
Round courgettes are having a moment, and ‘Tonda chiara di Toscana’ is their heritage representative. Austrian seed company Austrosaat lists it in its 2026 range as a round, medium-green rarity with short vines (item 3095, enough for about 10 plants). It sits alongside modern F1 hybrids such as ‘Eight Ball’ and ‘Gold Rush’.
The comparison with ‘Eight Ball’ is telling. That dark-green American hybrid was bred in Colorado in the 1990s and won an All-America Selections award in 1999. But it didn’t invent the round courgette; the Florentines got there long before. There’s also no evidence that the Tuscan variety was one of Eight Ball’s parents.
How to Grow It
Sowing: In Austria, start seeds under cover in April or May, about 2–3 cm deep in pots. Plant out only after the last frost, usually after the “Ice Saints” in mid-May. Handle the roots gently when transplanting.
Space: Allow about a metre per plant, 90–120 cm depending on the seed strain. Traditional Tuscan populations had two growth habits: one with a single shoot reaching four to five metres, the other with four or five shorter, more productive shoots. Today’s commercial seed has been further selected. Mine never ran anywhere near five metres, and they kept a two-person household supplied from July to September.
Flowers don’t guarantee fruit: Courgettes carry separate male and female flowers on the same plant. Without pollination, young fruits shrivel. This happens especially early in the season, when pollen is scarce.
Watch for mildew: The variety is known to be susceptible to powdery mildew and viruses. Mine caught it in the second half of the season. What helped:
- generous spacing and good airflow
- trimming back older leaves
- consistent watering at the base, never over the foliage
Good neighbours: Nasturtiums, borage, French marigolds, bush beans and flowering dill attract bees and beneficial insects. My favourite setup for one plant: two nasturtiums, two compact marigolds, one borage and some dill nearby. Keep companions at the edges, not in the middle of the foliage.
Harvesting: Pick young, before the seeds swell. Tennis-ball size is already a touch too big; around 6–8 cm across is ideal. Regular picking keeps new fruits coming. A bonus of the round shape: you rarely miss one, so you’re mostly spared the monster courgette hiding under a leaf.
Tender, Mild and Made for Stuffing
Picked young, ‘Tonda chiara di Toscana’ is tender, mild and subtly sweet, with an especially fine, sage-green skin. It doesn’t shout. Instead, it soaks up olive oil, garlic, basil, mint and Parmesan.
Five reasons cooks love it:
- A natural edible bowl: Slice off a lid, hollow it out, fill it with rice, herbs, vegetables, meat or cheese, and bake it whole.
- A mild team player: It carries other flavours rather than overpowering them.
- Beautiful on the plate: It works as a vegetarian main or an elegant side for fish and meat.
- Zero waste: The scooped-out flesh goes, finely chopped, straight into the filling.
- Freshness wins: From your own garden, you pick exactly the size your recipe needs.
It’s also lovely raw as crudo, or sliced and poached or pan-fried.
My Honest Verdict
I love the Tuscan for its history, its shape and its tenderness. On flavour alone, though, ‘Eight Ball’ wins for me. It has more of a proper “courgette taste” and reminds me of long varieties like ‘Black Forest’. The yellow round types are milder still, almost mallow-like. In the end, harvest size, growing conditions and cooking matter as much as the variety itself. So why not grow both and taste for yourself?
Source: Tesi, R. (1987). La coltivazione delle ortive in serra: zucca da zucchini. L’Italia Agricola, 124(3), 109–116.
